Putin warns rivals; do not try for strategic advantage
State of the Nation address
Highlights of Syrian Crisis, Ukraine 'Revolts'& other Issues
Note by the author; President Putin has already been nominated as the most powerful person by Forbes .For his handling of the Syrian crisis and resolving it peacefully, he should also be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama did not deserve.
In his State of the Nation address at the Federal Assembly in Moscow on 12 Dec ,2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin said that no one should have illusions over the possibility of taking any strategic advantage against Russia .He declared , "We will never allow this."
Russia will be a leader but will not lecture other states on how they should live, "We will aspire to be a leader by protecting international law and insisting upon respect for national sovereignty, independence and uniqueness of peoples,"
"We have always been proud of our country, yet we do not aspire to super-power status, which is understood as a claim to global or regional hegemony. We are not encroaching on anyone's interests, we are not pushing our patronage on anyone and we are not trying to lecture anyone on how one should live," he stressed.
The true goals of the missile defense system being built by Western countries do not correspond with its name, Putin affirmed.
"We are perfectly aware that missile defense systems are defensive only in name. In fact, this is a significant component of a strategic offensive potential,"
Russia has reacted angrily to U.S. plans to set up a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The U.S. military says the system is needed to ensure the region is protected from any threats emanating from Iran or North Korea. The Kremlin has demanded assurances the system would not target its national interests or upset the regional balance of power.
"The increase by foreign countries of their strategic, high-precision non-nuclear systems potential and boosting missile defense possibilities could ruin earlier reached agreements in the sphere of nuclear arms control and reduction and lead the disruption of the so-called strategic balance," the Russian president said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last month questioned the need for a U.S. regional deterrence against Iran now that multilateral negotiations were under way to allay concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions, RIA Novosti reported.
Unfortunately, the US military-industry complex controlled by financiers and bankers, of whom Bushes, Blairs, Obamas are just obedient servants continues to chug along creating imbalances and tensions and wars, deaths and destruction around the world.
Political competition
Russia's president spoke for development of political competition in the country and for wide public discussion of key issues.
"I believe it is important that many new parties have asserted themselves, wining seats in municipal and regional bodies of authority, they have laid a good foundation for the participation in future election campaigns. I am sure that they will be worthy competitors to the political old-timers," the president said.
Economy
The main reasons for the slowdown in economic growth in Russia are internal, not external, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his address to the Federal Assembly.
"Yes, of course we are feeling the consequences of the global crisis. But we have to be frank and say the main reasons for the slowdown [in economic growth in Russia] are not external but internal," he said.
The ambitious goals of Russia's socioeconomic development set in the May 2012 presidential decrees will not be revised due to economic difficulties, Putin said.
"I hear from time to time that there is not enough money for the implementation of all these declared plans and goals, and that it is necessary to lower our standards and to simplify our tasks. I believe politics should not be based on formal principles," Putin said.
"Surely, economic trends may vary, but this is no reason to talk about revising our goals," Putin said. "We should do real work, look for solutions, and clearly set budgets and other priorities," Putin added.
Human rights
Putin proposed a broad discussion of a law on public control. He also proposed to promote the human rights movements in the country.
"Today's Russia stands in need of a broad public discussion, the one that brings about practical results, a discussion that turns public initiatives into state policies," he said."Society should control their execution."
"I think all the bills, key state decisions and strategic plans should pass the so-called 'zero reading' in which nongovernmental organizations and other institutes of civic society will take place," Putin added
Russia's President Vladimir Putin is dissatisfied with the fact that an effective system to support non-raw-material export has not begun, and demands from the government and the Agency of Strategic Investments to offer by March 1, 2014 a new roadmap on development of the export.
"A system of the kind has not begun working. Many administrative barriers still exist. An export license processing takes over 20 days. Compare with six days in the US, eight in Canada or South Korea. All these aspects should be considered in a new roadmap on supporting the export," the president said.
"I am addressing the government and the Agency of Strategic Investments to offer it by Marc h 1, 2014," he said.
Taxation
Vladimir Putin said that offshore zones still have to be taxed under Russian laws.
On the ongoing political standoff in Kyiv.
"I hope that all political powers in the country manage to reach an agreement that is in the interests of the Ukrainian people and find a solution to all the problems that have piled up," Putin said.
Perhaps in light of the fact that many have accused the Kremlin of exerting pressure on Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign an association agreement with the European Union, Putin stressed Kiev's right to self determination. Specifically, he said the Kremlin was putting no pressure on Ukraine to join a customs union with Russia
.
"We are not imposing anything on anyone, but if our [Ukrainian] friends want joint work [on a customs union] we are ready for a continuation of that work at expert level," Putin said. "Our integration project is based on equal rights, on real economic interests."
Yanukovych travelled to Sochi for talks with Putin last Friday, but officials on both sides denied they had discussed the customs union, which currently includes Kazakhstan and Belarus. Anti-government protesters in Kyiv were angered by the talks, which came a week after Yanukovych balked at signing the EU accord.
In defense of traditional values
The Russian leader also used the speech to defend a law passed almost a year ago, which made it illegal to promote a gay or lesbian lifestyle. The law, which bans "propaganda of non-traditional relations", has been widely criticized in the West, and some gay rights activists have even called for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February.
Putin pledged to continue to defend traditional values from attack, saying these had helped make Russia great.
"This destruction of traditional values from above not only entails negative consequences for society, but is also inherently anti-democratic because it is based on an abstract notion and runs counter to the will of the majority of people," he said.
No 'superpower' aspirations
In Thursday's speech, Putin also denied that Russia was or was seeking to become a superpower, saying that Moscow did not aspire to "global and regional hegemony" or to "teach anyone how to live."
This statement came in sharp contrast to a meeting with top army officers on Tuesday, in which he ordered them to build up Russia's military might in the Arctic region.
The president also used his state-of-the-union address to announce a package of initiatives aimed at cracking down on Russian companies that avoid paying tax by registering in foreign countries. He also said Russian-operated but foreign-registered companies would be excluded on bidding on government tenders.
The crisis in Ukraine
The Ukraine opposition has the full backing of the US which is not concerned with human rights, but is interested in global domination, Richard Becker, a political analyst from the anti-war ANSWER Coalition told RT.
RT: Mr. Becker, could you shed a little light on something recently taking place? That the US Secretary of State and senator John McCain have both slammed Ukraine that the American diplomats have mingled with protesters. What is behind such intense interest?
Richard Becker: It's clear that what the US government is after a regime change in Ukraine. And this is part of their ongoing campaign to further break up the former Soviet Union. We have to ask the question: how is it that the US government determines that some acts of government suppression somewhere in the world are "disgusting" and yet stand silent when people rise up in Bahrain, or people are so suppressed in Saudi Arabia?
Washington's geopolitical interest is in global domination? It has nothing to do with what they say they are concerned with - human rights and democracy. And again [the] US is willing to impose sanctions. We have to ask the question from here: why are there no sanctions against the US for what they did to Iraq or what it's done in Afghanistan, in Vietnam or in so many other countries around the world. Why does the US have the authority in the world to declare sanctions against any government given its own track record?
RT: Washington is now considering sanctions against Kiev. It is apparently acknowledged that President Yanukovych was elected democratically but doesn't it show the same pattern the US has used before, such as in dealing with Libya or Syria?
RB: These forms of intervention around the world. We saw here in the US the repression of the occupying movement and dozens if not hundreds of cities carried out in an organized way and in a coordinated way directed by the federal government against people who were peacefully protesting here. When in Ukraine it is clear that the leaders of the opposition are trying to overthrow the government. They are not just engaging in peaceful protests. They are engaged in a process that they hope would bring about regime change. And in that campaign they have the full backing of the US and NATO.
RT: In your opinion how would Washington react if Kremlin officials were seen mingling with anti-Obama protesters in front of the White House in a similar sort of a situation?
RB: To ask the question is almost to answer it. There would be hysteria in the media if that were to be the case. If there was an intervention by those who are employed by any government which the US views as hostile or even if they were from governments the US views as friendly. That would be regarded as utterly unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the US by the government leaders, and yet they have no compunction about doing this now in Ukraine and in many other cases around the world.
RT: Do you think Washington is ignoring the eastern half of the country who wants something different to those in the west. In the east according to recent polls more than 60 percent want to join the Russian's Customs Union.
RB: Yes, this is now almost a blank in the US media; that reality is left out of the equation, left out of the presentation to the public of the US because what is going on is an attempt to gather support from the public for a more interventionist, more aggressive policy against Ukraine and against Russia, as has been carried out against a number of other countries in the world.
US Franchised Street Revolutions
In early mid 2000s , US led West and so called freedom promoting organizations had openly interfered in former states of the USSR .This writer had written articles on them .Since they had used similar techniques in most uprisings ,say in all Mac Donald outlets , he had named them US Franchised Uprisings .Below are some URLs .
· After Non-Franchised Andean Uprising East Closes Ranks
· Central Asian Backlash Against US Franchised Revolutions
· Georgia in Turmoil: A Gambit in the Eurasian Great Game
· Strategic Chess Moves across Eurasia
· Ukraine: Another Key Stage in East-West Strategic Battle
Now a little more light on Syria
Russia's steps intended to help settle the Syrian conflict have been "well-judged and reasonable", and the latest developments surrounding Syria confirm the possibility of resolving any international problems peacefully, Putin said in the Federal Assembly.
"In my opinion, it is our shared success that the choice was made on the basis of the fundamental principles of international law, common sense and the logic of peace. At least thus far we have managed to avoid foreign military intervention in Syrian affairs and the spread of the conflict beyond the region," Putin said.
Russia "made quite a significant contribution to this process," the president said.
"Our actions have been resolute, well-judged and reasonable. Not a single time have we put either our own interests and security or global security in danger? In my opinion, this is the way a mature and responsible power should act," Putin said.
"As a result, we and our partners managed to turn the situation there away from war and toward the development of a nationwide Syrian political process and the achievement of civil reconciliation," the president said.
"The Syrian precedent reaffirmed the UN's central role in global politics. As the situation around Syria and around Iran today has shown, any international problem can and should be resolved exclusively by peaceful means, without resorting to military actions, which have no prospects, but only serve to cause denunciation by the majority of countries in the world," Putin said.
Armageddon Averted
Let me quote from an article American Hegemony is Over by Israel Shamir at the Rhodes Forum, on October 5, 2013. Shamir, a very well informed and independent analyst of international affairs is a very dear friend.
"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them - the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and supported by Chinese warships. Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination.
It was claimed by a Lebanese newspaper quoting diplomatic sources that the missiles were launched from a NATO air base in Spain and they were shot down by the Russian ship-based sea-to-air defence system. Another explanation proposed by the Asia Times says the Russians employed their cheap and powerful GPS jammers to render the expensive Tomahawks helpless, by disorienting them and causing them to fail. Yet another version attributed the launch to the Israelis, whether they were trying to jump-start the shoot-out or just observed the clouds, as they claim
Whatever the reason, after this strange incident, the pending shoot-out did not commence, as President Obama stood down and holstered his guns. This was preceded by an unexpected vote in the British Parliament. This venerable body declined the honour of joining the attack proposed by the US. This was the first time in two hundred years that the British parliament voted down a sensible proposition to start a war; usually the Brits can't resist the temptation.
After that, President Obama decided to pass the hot potato to the Congress. He was unwilling to unleash Armageddon on his own. Thus the name of action was lost. Congress did not want to go to war with unpredictable consequences. Obama tried to browbeat Putin at the 20G meeting in St Petersburg, and failed. The Russian proposal to remove Syrian chemical weaponry allowed President Obama to save face. This misadventure put paid to American hegemony, supremacy and exceptionalism. Manifest Destiny was over. We all learned that from Hollywood flics: the hero never stands down; he draws and shoots! If he holsters his guns, he is not a hero: he's chickened out.
Afterwards, things began to unravel fast. The US President had a chat with the new president of Iran, to the chagrin of Tel Aviv. The Free Syrian Army rebels decided to talk to Assad after two years of fighting him, and their delegation arrived in Damascus, leaving the Islamic extremists high and dry. Their supporter Qatar is collapsing overextended. The shutdown of their government and possible debt default gave the Americans something real to worry about. With the end of US hegemony, the days of the dollar as the world reserve currency are numbered.
World War III almost occurred as the banksters wished it. They have too many debts, including the unsustainable foreign debt of the US. If those Tomahawks had flown, the banksters could have claimed Force Majeure and disavow the debt. Millions of people would die, but billions of dollars would be safe in the vaults of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. In September, the world crossed this bifurcation point safely, as President Obama refused to take the fall for the banksters. Perhaps he deserved his Nobel peace prize, after all."
Finally let me further quote from
"Dismemberment of Command: America's Military Shakeup"
By Gordon Duff and New Eastern Outlook of 24 October, 2013.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/10/24/dismemberment-of-command-americas-military-shakeup/
"We all knew the military was being "cleaned up." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General "Marty" Dempsey, when he assumed America's top military command, filled a position that had been virtually vacant for over a decade.
That decade and more had been filled with failures of command, dozens of them, at the highest levels, numerous inexplicable and often senseless violations of good order and discipline. Moreover, many of those violations bordered on or exceeded the necessary prerequisites to qualify as war crimes or treason.
There had always been a "revolving door" in Washington, carefully groomed military careers could propel "armchair generals" to weighty positions with defense contractors, think tanks or mysteriously funded "chairs" at prestigious universities.
Thus when General Richard Myer *, a predecessor of Dempsey, while testifying before the 9/11 Commission, when unable to explain the many failures of command structures and defense protocols that allowed the attacks to proceed surprised none.
*A four star air force general
In fact, he had only assumed the chair of the Joint Chiefs a few days before 9/11. His tenure, until 2005, saw two illegal wars, a drug empire built in Afghanistan, trillions of dollars disappear in defense funding and the military itself purged of all commanders who failed to pass a political "purity test" established by Vice President Cheney.
Dempsey's role as "house cleaner" has reached into the pinnacle of America's nuclear command structure at a critical time, and not by coincidence.
There has been no reporting in the mainstream media regarding the 180-degree turnabout in American policy over both Syria and Iran in the past few weeks. In fact, those policies changed overnight.
The reason was never given and, even more curiously, never questioned. One day, the US was ready to rain missiles onto Syria. Anything Russia said, no matter how much supporting documentation was offered, was discarded. America had returned to the unilateralism of the Bush presidency.
Secretary of State Kerry announced to the world that the Assad government in Syria was responsible for large-scale chemical warfare in the environs of Syria's own capitol city. Kerry had exact numbers of casualties, details on radio intercepts and full satellite data on the attacks themselves.
Then he didn't
It was found that the radio intercepts came from "Group 8200," identified by Colonel James Hanke, former Defense Attaché to Israel as a Mossad psychological operations unit. The "intercepts" were invented.
What follows is worse; if the intercepts were invented and the intercepts established whose forces were in control of the areas the chemical weapons were launched from, and then data on the launchings was not just erroneous but totally wrong.
This began in investigation. There were also HUMINT (HUman INTelligence) sources that filled in Kerry's "intelligence mosaic." When a process was initiated to verify those sources, they simply disappeared "in a puff of smoke."
The result of this investigation, one that will never be made public, is that, within both the Pentagon and White House, individuals responsible for collating and reporting intelligence to cabinet members, members of congress and even the president were, in actuality, espionage agents.
They were and are "moles." Washington is reliving the fictional reality of a John Le Carre novel.
Further examinations of policy documents submitted covered intelligence on Iran. National Intelligence Estimates and reports from the IAEA had found that Iran had accounted for all nuclear material. Claims that Iran had diverted material for "high level enrichment" were, in fact, not just insubstantial but purposefully so.
In fact, the pattern is slowly tracing back to 9/11 and before, including any and all intelligence that led to the attacks on both Iraq and Afghanistan but much more.
As an aside, we take a second to look at Afghanistan. The former First Secretary of the Soviet and Russian embassies in Kabul was Colonel Eugene Khrushchev, a longtime friend. Gene, an expert on the region and co-editor at Veterans Today, is deeply suspicious of US involvement in the sudden and inexplicable growth in narcotics production in Afghanistan.
"Gene" as I call him, cited pronouncements by former US Envoy, Richard Holbrooke that demonstrated somewhat more than "passive support" for what had been a very small opium production issue and what had now become a massive heroin production and distribution industry.
None of this would have been possible, not under America's military occupation of Afghanistan, without full complicity of American commanders.
Similarly, in Iraq, hundreds of billions of dollars of dollars, aid funding, military supplies, weapons, disappeared, all under close military scrutiny.
Prior to that, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had unearthed over two trillion dollars in defense accounting "errors."
Our question is a simple one; what happens when we take a military command authority whose normal good order and discipline is impacted by political extremism and an "unreliable" electoral process to which you throw billions of dollars of potential bribes and payoffs into the mix?
Then take this military command, now little more than a "street gang," and arm it to the teeth, stoke it up on race hatred and religious bigotry, tell it that it is above any rule of law and loose it on half the planet.
How then does the context change, when top nuclear officers are removed, commanders of the most devastating weapons arsenals imagined?
One more thing to add into the mix, missing nuclear weapons. When Fox News today reported the firing of General Michael Carey, they were careful to cite that his removal was not over missing nuclear weapons.
One might ask; when is a denial an accusation?
Over the past six years, there have been two major command shakeups with American strategic nuclear forces. In 2007, Minot Air Force Base, a leading American nuclear defense facility accidentally misplaced an unknown number of thermonuclear warheads, ostensibly "mistakenly" shipping them to another base without authority or necessary record keeping.
Six weapons were listed as recovered. The launch/storage device used was designed to hold nine.
The American form of government was intended to not only separate "church and state" but put the military under civilian control. What does one do when those lines are blurred?
